


the greatest heights

by portions_forfox



Category: The Beatles
Genre: F/M, Gen, meme fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-24 03:31:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/629888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Linda, in three acts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the greatest heights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/gifts).



> Written for [Selena](http://selenak.livejournal.com) @ [this meme](http://portions-forfox.livejournal.com/47054.html). Assumes some background information, but in case you aren't super familiar, see the handy dandy [Linda McCartney wikipedia page!](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_McCartney)

**ONE.**

She and her sisters used to tease their older brother when they were young, when she was a sour teen who wore her hair all to one side and boots beneath her skirt. Sixteen years old with a rag-tag gang of sisters, ten and seven each. 

“Linda, Laura, Louise, and John,” they’d chime, the corners of Linda’s lips lifting up into a smirk and her sisters tugging at the fringe of her jacket, tittering as their brother smiled. “One of these things is not like the other.”

“Says Daddy’s favorite,” John would grunt at Linda, heaving Louise up into his arms, a giggling tumbling bundle of girl, blonde locks, Eastman smile. “The old man only wrote a song about one of us, Lou,” he sighed theatrically, bouncing the little one in his lap, “and it isn’t you or me.”

“Is it me?” wondered Laura, and

“I was _one_!” Linda groaned, and

“Quit it,” called the other Louise from the bedroom, the river-lilting tinge of love beneath her voice—“Your father loves you all the same.”

“Clear bias,” John’d whisper in Louise’s ear, and she giggled.

 

“Is there just the one song about you, Lindy?” Laura asked, big brown eyes, small little hands at her big sister’s waist. 

“Just the one.” Linda tugged her hair once, and Laura hummed, “Well, someday there’ll be more.”

 

Daddy always said: family first.

 

**TWO.**

Wenner clicks a pen in his hand, spins side to side in his swerving chair. The photo’s on the desk in front of him, gazing up at the ceiling in voiceless contemplation. He stares Linda down across from him, glances at the picture, glances back. Jann Wenner doesn’t fill silences. Neither does she.

“It’s a good picture,” he says finally, and she shoots him a look. He pauses, clicks the pen in, out. “It’s a great picture,” he admits. She nods once, meets his eyes on an offbeat. He quits spinning suddenly and leans over the desk with practiced motions, his suit jacket sliding against the smooth wood surface, his hands folded, his lips pursed. “How would you feel about us putting it on the cover?” he proposes, mouth moving careful over the words.

“Not ecstatic,” she tells him, a quick-fire response.

He’s surprised, that much is evident, thick eyebrows shooting up. “Not ecstatic?” he repeats, hiding incredulity behind half a smirk. “Not ecstatic? You’d be the first female photographer _ever_ to get a photo on the cover _Rolling Stone_. And you’d be—what is it—not ecstatic?”

Linda doesn’t answer right away—looks at him, pulls her lips tight, won’t let it touch her eyes. “Like you said, Mr. Wenner,” she answers, even-toned. She leans back in her chair and gestures toward the glossy photo with one hand, Clapton’s plaintive face staring sideways of the lens, an intimate portrait, a singular style—“It’s a great picture,” she says. “On the cover is where it deserves to be.”

Wenner studies her a moment with his eyes, squinting—trying to root her out. His hands are still folded on the desk, clamped together white and sweaty. 

Finally, he leans back, picks up his pen. Starts clicking it again, starts spinning. “All right then, Ms. Eastman,” he tells her. “All right.”

 

Later, he ushers her to the door, talking fast about the promotion and the dinners and the rapid-fire events, says _Ms. Eastman, there’s a gala in SoHo this weekend we’re going to need you to attend; next week we’ll have to fly you out to Los Angeles for a_ —

Linda winces, visible. “What,” Wenner wants to know, his hand at her back. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she backtracks. “It’s—I’m just not a huge fan of flying, that’s all.”

“Oh,” this, the usual response. “Why not?” and this time he’s genuinely curious, a friendly interest built up in his voice.

“Oh,” she sighs, “Um, my mother…” She waves her wrist in the air as she speaks, the best explanation for the words. “Family,” she finishes. “My family.”

 

**THREE.**

Paul reads the letter for the first time through while the children are out playing in the garden, their voices laughing, rising and falling outside the sunlit windows. He reads it silently and Linda watches him, bites her fingernails in the doorway. His face hardly changes at all. 

When he finishes, he folds the paper into perfectly exercised creases, seals it up meticulously till it’s barely over the size of a nickel. Drops it on the coffee table. Runs a hand through his hair once. And she thinks, automatically, that he looks _tired_ more than anything. Just massively, infinitely tired.

 

He is angry, for her sake. “I can take him shitting on me,” he tells her, his voice higher than he most likely wants it to be, tone cracking at the edges, crumbling in on itself like the very edges of that letter. “I can take him saying every vile, every—every _nasty_ thing he can possibly think up just as long as he’s saying it to _me_ , but, but, but…” His hands are shaking, his head bowed. He paces their bedroom, steps uneven, knees wobbling in the walk. “But when he brings _you_ into it? When he—when he starts slagging _you_ off in his, in his, his fucking _letters_ , that— _that_ I won’t stand for,” and he waggles his finger, brings his hand to the back of his neck. Paul stands up straight with a sudden stiffness, like he’s only just remembered something—turns to her, eyes filled with too many threads of thought to count, altogether too much. He’s shaking still, every part of him. “Family first,” he remembers, and his voice is like a child’s.

And Linda _knows_ , she—she _knows_ what it means to have a family, to protect a family. At twenty-one she was motherless, clinging to her siblings and to her father; at twenty-two she was young and naïve and newly married, had a daughter, and three years later was alone again. And she’s thankful every day that she was able to start again, to bring Heather into a new life, a new home, a new family. Linda’s had a patchwork of families in her life, and she knows Paul better than he knows himself.

“Darling,” and she reaches for his hand, clings to it—holds it tight in her own palm and meets his gaze head-on. She smiles at him. “He _is_ your family.”


End file.
